Ease User Engagement With Cloud Based Trials

Cloud hosted virtual images present a unique opportunity to engage potential users and contributors. By providing a pre-built image of your projects latest release you can ensure that first impressions are good. By including tutorial materials you can expose some of your projects hidden power. By providing a fully configured build environment more advanced users can get deep and dirty with the code itself. However, successful community building is much more than simply uploading an image and hoping for the best.

In this session we will explore some of the ways in which virtual machine images can be used to build interest in and contributions t your software. We’ll examine what kinds of images are appropriate for different kinds of projects, how images can be used to serve different users needs. Finally we’ll walk through the creation of an image for the Apache Wookie project and demonstrate how the process can be rolled into a projects standard release process.

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Ross Gardler

Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.

Ross Gardler has been involved with open source in one form or another since the mid ‘90s. He is a member of the Apache Software Foundation where he currently serves as the foundations President. He’s been an independent strategy consultant, led the UK academic research sectors open source advisory service and now works for Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.